The Pond Inheritance
by Laura Schiller
Summary: Amy Martin receives a much needed glimpse of the future. Spoilers for "A Million Suns" and "The Angels Take Manhattan".
1. Chapter 1

The Pond Inheritance

By Laura Schiller

Crossover: _Across the Universe/Doctor Who_

Copyright: Beth Revis/BBC

When Dr. River Song, archeologist, convict and very new bride, stepped out of the TARDIS for her promised honeymoon tour, she was not quite pleased to find herself in a white laboratory full of metal shelves. There was a distinct chill in the air, too, and not only in her mood.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Doctor, but this doesn't look like Planet Barcelona to me."

"That's because it isn't," said the Doctor, annoyingly matter-of-fact. "We're on the starship _Godspeed._ Earth's first-ever generation ship. Seriously, one little economic depression – okay, maybe four or five – in the 2020's and suddenly they all start zooming off into space. America started it, of course. Pioneering spirit and all that. And _no,_ River, you cannot blame my piloting this time. For whatever inscrutable reason, the Old Girl wants us here."

He patted the TARDIS and moved ahead of River on his lanky legs, whipping out his sonic screwdriver for any sense of trouble. She followed with a wry smile of resignation, figuring that as his wife she might as well get used to this.

One row of shelves over, they found what they were looking for.

She had once been told, a lifetime and several apocalypses ago, that the Doctor never interfered with history – unless he saw children crying. The slight female figure on the white-tiled floor, sitting in a puddle of water between two slowly defrosting cryogenic tanks, was not quite a child anymore – but judging by her huddled posture, her quiet sniffs and the fall of bright orange hair hiding her face, she might as well have been. River felt transported back to her childhood – her second childhood in Leadworth. _"Tell me I'm not crazy, Mels,"_ she heard a Scottish voice whisper. _"Please tell me you still believe in him."_

"Amy … " she murmured, involuntarily taking a step closer.

The red-haired girl looked up, jumped to her feet – giving them just enough time to see that her face was a stranger's – and ran up to them, smiling through her tears.

"_River_!" she exclaimed, throwing her arms around the older woman's neck.

River's first thought was, _Please don't tell me you're my future daughter. _Her next was, _Does the Doctor know about this?_ Peering over at him, she was relieved to see him looking even more gobsmacked than she did.

"Close your mouth, sweetie, you'll let the flies in," she told him. "And as for you … Amy … " Carefully detaching herself from her armful of crying teenager, she held the girl at arm's length and took a closer look at her face. "You'll have to forgive me, but I'm not sure who you are. I'm a time traveller, you see. I tend to meet people out of order. Do you understand?"

The girl nodded, wiped her tears with a cloth handkerchief from her pocket and made a nervous effort to stand up straight, suddenly conscious of meeting a pair of strangers. Come to think of it, there _was_ a resemblance. She had the Pond eyes, a soft spring green, and that same dusting of freckles – although, thankfully, she had been spared the Williams nose. River tried not to notice how bitterly disappointed those green eyes looked for a moment, until that look was blinked away by a determined smile.

"Oh … right. Yeah. Well, I'm Amy Martin. I … we're cousins. Once removed, I think is this phrase. Your grandmother – Tabitha Pond – is my mom's sister."

"So you're Maria and Robert's daughter? From the States?" She remembered, vaguely, eavesdropping on Tabitha's often spirited phone conversations with her sister Maria, who had caused such an uproar in the family by leaving behind a lucrative research position in London to marry a soldier from Colorado. The confusing similiarity of their daughters' names, whether deliberate or not, had been another affront. Apparently, the women of this family all had tempers to match their hair.

Amy nodded, giggling slightly, as the banality of the situation – just two distant relatives catching up, in the most unlikely time and place – caught up to her. Her smile quickly faded, however, and she hurriedly turned around to push the two cryotanks back into their shelves and shut the doors.

"My – my parents," she said, swallowing back tears. "You don't want to see that. Anyway - " She deliberately turned away from River and held out her hand to the Doctor, who had been doing his tactful best to fade into the walls and, as usual, failing spectacularly. "_You_ must be Eleven, right? I haven't seen you with that face since I was - "

"Spoilers!" he sang out, holding up his hand, grinning at the implication that Amy knew several of his incarnations. "No giving away when we'll visit you."

Amy rolled her eyes at him, making River smile despite herself.

"This is _brilliant_," he continued, pumping Amy's hand up and down while using the other to scan her with his sonic screwdriver. "You really are related to River! Someone remind me to give my TARDIS a refit. Oh, and there!" One beep of the sonic, and Amy's red, puffy eyes looked noticeably better. "One of the many benefits of being married to River, I'm always finding new uses for this. Now, Amy Martin, my cousin-by-marriage with the fantastically ginger hair … what do you say to taking a little trip?"

"In your time machine?"

"TARDIS," he corrected her. "Short for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. And yes."

For a moment, underneath her joy, Amy's eyes looked positively hungry.

"You have no _idea_ how long I've waited for this," she said. "I'd do anything to get off this floating box."

_Tell me about it, cousin,_ thought River, who had a Stormcage cell waiting for her at the end of her honeymoon.

"Well then," said the Doctor, snatching up Amy's hand in one hand and River's in the other. "Come along, ladies. I have _just_ the planet to show you."


	2. Chapter 2

Amy Martin's head was whirling. One minute, she had been going through her daily mourning ritual for her lost home and frozen planets. The next, she was stepping out of a bigger-than-the-inside blue box (about whose navigation River and Doctor had bickered like any human couple) and feeling grass – _grass!_ – under her shipmade leather shoes for the first time in over three centuries.

A breeze brushed her face. She tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and breathed in.

They were on a planet. A planet of blue skies and fresh, moving air, the smell of earth and fallen leaves. Opening her eyes, she saw that they stood on a hill. Behind them stood a forest, or a jungle, of sweeping ferns, climbing vines, and towering red-wooded trees. Their leaves, like the grass, were in startling shades of red, gold and purple, with only the occasional streak of green. Birds – or, at any rate, creatures – were chirping and twittering in the branches, sweeter to Amy's ears than any music Bartie had ever coaxed out of his guitar.

In front of them, at the bottom of the hill, was a large village – or a small town, depending on how you looked at it – built from log cabins, with horses and carriages moving along the hard-packed dirt roads in between. If not for the red grass, the twin suns and the faintly alien scent of the air, Amy would have supposed herself to be travelling back in time to meet Laura Ingalls Wilder. On close inspection, however, the comparison did not hold true: at the center of the village where the church would have been, was a large square building with no visible adornments, except for a metal plate above the doors. Metal and plastic gleamed in patches on the cabins, a tractor was chugging away in the golden fields beyond the village, and some of the horses looked distinctly unlike the Earth horses she remembered.

"Where _are _we?" she whispered.

"Martinstown," replied the Doctor, sweeping his arm in the town's direction as if to present her a gift. "First human colony of Centauri Prime. Fascinating, isn't it?"

Centauri? _Martinstown_?

"They … they named it after my parents?"

"After you, my dear."

"Me?" A hysterical laugh bubbled up inside her, bursting out with such force that she had to double over. "You're kidding."

"Trust me," said River, "His jokes are _much_ stranger than this."

"No, no, you don't understand," Amy continued, shaking her fiery head. "There must be some mistake. They wouldn't name their colony after me. They – they hate me. They think I'm a freak. Except - " _Harley, Steela, Orion and Elder_, she thought, but their memory did not bring her any comfort. Two were dead, one was a murderer, and as for Elder, he had called her "freak" once too. He might not have meant it, but the moment was not easy to forget.

"In your timeframe, maybe," the Doctor pointed out. "But from our perspective, you see, the future is already history, and vice versa. Whatever you've done, or are doing, or will do … it'something extraordinary. They _will_ respect you, Amy Martin. They just don't know it yet."

As he looked down at her, she was disconcerted to see the pride in his pale green eyes fade away into a look of boyish anxiety which reminded her of Elder. He backed away, coughed, and made a little quarter-turn, with his fingers extended as if to show his feet where to go.

"Oh. Oh, dear. Well. I'll walk ahead, shall I?" With one imploring look at his wife and a toss of his floppy-haired head in Amy's direction, he jerked himself around and began loping down the hill at an astonishing speed.

Touching her hand to her cheek, Amy realized she was crying.

"A word of advice," said River. "Don't let him see you hurting. He'll either tear space, time and himself apart trying to fix you, or simply ignore it. He's an all-or-nothing man. Bit exhausting, really."

Amy thought of the Eldest line and their mood swings, magnified by about nine hundred years of death and loss. "I can imagine."

River put an arm around her smaller cousin's shoulders as they followed the Doctor. They walked in silence as Amy struggled to get her scrambled thoughts in order. The idea of becoming a heroine to the _Godspeed_ crew was both comforting and terrifying – on the one hand, it was good to know that someday, all those who had sneered at her would be eating their words. On the other hand … what would it cost her to achieve this thing? Would she even survive?

"What did I _do_?" she asked, more to herself than to River. "Or, I mean, what _will_ I do?"

"Never mind the verb tenses, dear. I know what you mean."

Amy rolled her eyes. She had forgotten how cold-blooded the older couple's lives made them sometimes, at least compared to ordinary mortals.

"What did you do?" River shrugged, taking the question a bit more seriously now she saw the anxiety on Amy's face. "Well, I can't tell you, can I? Spoilers, as my husband always says. Can't you think of anything you've done in your past that would make you worthy of recognition?"

Could she? Was disrupting the ship's order, distracting its leader from his work and wallowing in homesickness any reason to have a town named after her?

"I don't think so."

"Amy … " The note of pity in River's voice was rather unnerving. River rarely pitied anyone; it was a luxury that, with a life like hers, she could not afford. "Amy, who controls the ship in your timeframe?"

"Elder. Why?"

"Ah. So his predecessor's dead and the killer frozen, is that correct?" She sounded pleased with that fact, in a detached, academic sort of way.

"You know about that?"

"I earned a PhD in archeology. Luna University, 5039 CE."

"Right." Amy preferred not to think about Martinstown turning into a pile of ruins.

"What I meant to say was, what do you suppose would have happened to the crew if Elder hadn't woken you up?"

The more she considered it, the more she wondered if her time-traveling cousin might be right. Eldest would still be leader, for one thing – keeping the ship on Phydus, keeping his secrets, telling his lies.

But Harley … perhaps Harley would still be alive, if Amy hadn't been around to remind him of his dead love and show him the stars that drove him mad. Elder's foster-mother Evie and so many others would not gave sunk into that terrible depression. With the workers drugged into obedience, there would be no strikes, no shortages, no violence.

On the other hand – without Amy there to inspire and investigate, Orion might never have laid that trail for her to follow. A trail which, apparently, would lead to planet-landing after all.

Amy's eyes widened.

"You see?" said River, smiling.

"But … but I don't even know how we're supposed to get there," she stammered. "And Orion says the frozens were planning to use the shipborns as soldiers or slaves … there's about a million ways the colony could go wrong."

"There were," River replied gravely. "The colonization of Centauri Prime was not without sacrifices."

A chill went down Amy's spine as she wondered who the sacrifices would be. Kit? Doc? Victria? _Oh God, please not Elder._ She couldn't bear to lose him too.

Meanwhile, they were almost level with the town. She could see the houses clearly now, with alien flowers blooming in their front yards and carvings on the doors. She could see the people, both monoethnic shipborns and colonizers of different races: round eyes and slanted, thin lips and full ones, curly and straight hair, skin colors ranging from her own shade of pale to the darkness of bittersweet chocolate. Some of them looked thin and older than their years, but they smiled and greeted each other as they passed. A swarm of children was playing with a leather ball on the street.

Distracted by their talk, Amy had not noticed anything out of the ordinary, but as a little blond girl ran right past her to retrieve the ball, she frowned.

"Why can't they see us?" she asked River.

"Perception filter," answered the Doctor, who had waited to catch up with them.

"Sorry, what?"

"The TARDIS is making us invisible, so to speak. Well, not exactly – anyway, they won't notice you. Because if they did – "

"Oh." Some uncomfortable ideas occurred to her. "I'm not supposed to be here right now, am I? There's another me running around, an old lady or … or something." She wondered where the cemetery was here, shuddered, and could not help feeling annoyed with River and the Doctor's secrecy.

"I don't want to know the damned details, okay? But it seems to be like there's an awful lot about this place you're not telling me. _When_ do we get to the planet? Will I still be alive? Is Orion right about my father and the rest of them? Why bring me here if I'm not allowed to know?"

She threw up her hands in frustration, then lowered them, feeling like a little girl throwing a tantrum. The centuries-old Time Lord and his Lady tended to have that effect on her; too bad it was usually after she'd done something silly.

To her surprise, it was the Doctor who moved forward, taking both her hands in his and looking down at her with dark, bright, ancient, inhuman eyes.

"It's to give you hope," he said. "The treasure at the bottom of Pandora's box. The thread that holds the fabric of space-time together. Once upon a time, a man waited two thousand years for his wedding day. A young girl like you brought a forgotten traveller back to life by telling his story. A woman put the entire universe at risk to save her husband – and the universe survived."

From the stories of Amy's childhood, and the tenderness in the Doctor's eyes as he glanced from her to River, she knew exactly whom he was remembering as he spoke.

"Hope is your legacy, Amy Martin. Don't you give it up."

Tears were streaming down her face again, but this time, he did not turn away. Perhaps he understood her crying better than she did.


	3. Chapter 3

Silently, the Doctor released Amy's hands and turned back up the hill. The three of them walked side by side, River holding her husband's arm. Her curly hair brushed his face as she whispered something Amy could not hear. There were many sounds behind them – carriage wheels and horses' hooves, voices, a snatch of music – but they walked inside a bubble of quiet, each lost in their own thoughts.

By the time they reached the TARDIS, Amy could breathe easier again. As they entered and ranged themselves around the console, she cleared her throat to ask one more question.

"River, your parents … Amelia and Rory … what happened to them?"

The Doctor disappeared down a staircase, his face turned away. River bowed her head and took a few moments to answer, but when she met Amy's eyes, her face was almost calm. Only some faint lines at the corners of her mouth betrayed what she was feeling.

"Amy – Amelia – found a job in the literary industry. A publisher – science fiction and fantasy, that sort of thing. Rory kept on working as a nurse. They lived to an old age together, into their eighties. They were … I believe they were happy."

All common sense aside, for a moment Amy found it very hard to be contented with these news. It was one thing to know, in the abstract, that her favorite cousin – along with the rest of her family, her friends and Jason – had been dead for centuries. It was another thing to be told.

She thought of Amelia Pond, her namesake, with her ruby-red nails and the lively melody of her accent; jogging together down the cloudy streets of England and the sunny avenues of Florida; gossiping over a bowl of fish fingers and custard. She thought of Rory Williams, nicknamed "Mr. Pond" for his gallant respect towards his wife; smelling of Lysol and corduroy; watching the news with his eyes open for any alien activity; quietly embarrassed, one morning, to be caught doing fencing drills in the garden before sunrise.

At least they had stayed together. There was a comfort in that.

"So!" The Doctor's abrupt call as he stuck his head above the staircase made them both jump. For the moment, he was a boy again, grinning madly, his hair and bow tie askew. "Now that the Old Girl's made up her mind to fly again, where shall we go next? One more trip, Amy Martin, eh? What do you say?"

The idea was chance to see Earth again, walk along the canyons of Colorado and the beaches of Florida, see her grandmother before the Alzheimer's set in, maybe even confront Jason about his cheating, and most especially to tell Rory and Amelia how much she loved them – was like offering a feast to a starving woman. She had already opened her mouth to say yes when two things silenced her.

_Elder,_ she thought. What would he do without her? And – most alarmingly – what would she do without him?

The second thing was River, folding her arms and shaking her head.

"I think she'd better not," said River. "Sorry, Amy."

"Why not?" Amy and the Doctor chorused.

"It's too soon, Doctor." River's voice dropped to a whisper, possibly to prevent Amy from listening, but she still heard every word. "You know what happens when you try to do this. Think of Rose and Martha." Darting an anxious look at Amy, she cut herself off.

Catching sight of her redheaded reflection in the TARDIS console, Amy realized why. She took too much after the Pond side of the family. Replacing Amelia with Amy would not improve the Doctor's precarious peace of mind.

The Doctor glared at his wife, then sighed as he put his hands on her shoulders. "River, why do you _always_ have to be right?"

"Wifely intuition, sweetie." She kissed his cheek. "Don't worry. You'll find somebody when the time is right."

Amy looked away. _Frex._ There went her last chance to say goodbye. Centauri-Earth had better be worth it.

Thinking in _Godspeed _terms, however, brought her back to Elder. She must have been gone a while by now. Did he miss her? Was he afraid she'd been attacked by one of his xenophobic subjects? And Victria, pregnant and terrified, how was she coping? Would anyone else understand what Victria was going through?

She thought of Elder watching the stars by the release hatch, and her throat constricted. She did not want to leave him.

How had she put down roots on that floating disaster without even trying?

"Take me back to the ship, please," she said.

"Are you sure?"

River's voice was low and kind, her eyes full of understanding. She knew exactly how hard it was to give up this chance.

"As you said … Elder needs me. And I … " She felt a blush coming on and ducked her head. "I care about him. A lot."

"I see."

River nodded to the Doctor, who immediately started in on the TARDIS console like a hyperactive pianist. It took less than a minute for the time machine to shudder in and out of the Vortex. With all the gravity of a host at a dinner party, the Doctor opened the door and gestured grandly for Amy to pass through. Beyond him, she saw the cryo level just as she had left it: little metal doors, white walls, the smell of chemicals. Her parents' resting place. Her and Elder's window to the stars.

"It's been a pleasure meeting you, Amy Martin," said the Doctor.

"Um … thanks. You, too," politely ignoring the fact that for her, it was not their first meeting at all. "Thank you for the ride."

To her surprise, he bent down, took her face between his hands, and kissed her forehead like a father or an uncle – then took a rapid step back on his long legs, looking deeply embarrassed by the display.

"We'll see each other again, little cousin," River whispered as they hugged each other goodbye. "I promise. Until then – don't forget."

"As if I could!" were Amy's last words before walking out the door.


End file.
